The Origins of Visual Culture in the Islamic World Mohammed Hamdouni Alami (original) (raw)

Introduction. Visual Cultures of Islam: the Seen, Unseen and the in Between

In our modern world, we are continuously bombarded with visual images as a means of communication. The large variety of constructed visual cues that we see everyday, including everything from still images such as antique oil paintings to modern abstract art, photographs, posters, to moving visual feats of physical impossibilities on our televisions and computers received by way of advertisement, movies, YouTube clips, and news images, all contribute to the way we decipher the world around us; they, all collectively, inform and create what we call a visual culture. Just like the way various cultures are formed through social etiquettes, political desires, our histories and religious beliefs, and even the geographical location in which we live, visual cultures, too, are informed by repeated visual cues that we encounter in our everyday life. These visual cultures -which stem in our social cultures -not only shape how certain images should be read and understood but they also influence and affect our opinions, beliefs and values in powerful ways. Namely, they also influence our social cultures and attitudes. So, in effect, especially in today's world where the visual image in its various forms has become the most powerful tool of communication, it is difficult to separate the two. Our social cultures and visual cultures are continuously and seamlessly feeding off each other in extraordinary ways to help us make sense of our changing world. Unless we tune into this connection, it is easy to miss the influence of visual cultures in the way we understand and see our world. That is because visual cultures, like and as part of other aspects of our social cultures, are deeply embedded in our collective psyche, influenced by our national and personal histories, reinforced by politicians and businessmen, and our biases, to the degree that unless we stop and think about how we have been directed to read those images around us and their meanings, it is easy to miss this connection and be blindly guided by the very images we see in front of us.

Visual Representation in the Contexts of Islam and Islamism A Selected Bibliography

2022

The second part of the 20th and the beginning of 21th century saw a surge of interest worldwide in the art of the Islamic world. This curiosity and appreciation has been shared by scholars and students, museum curators and gallery owners, connoisseurs and collectors. Whereas thirty years ago so-called “Islamic art” was treated as very specialist subject for the initiate, the situation is very different now with the publication of a huge amount of literature approaching the subject on many levels for a wider audience and addressing an ever-widening range of issues. Hoewer this bibliography is not only focused on the “Islamic art” as caligaphy, geometric compositions, architecture, book-art, glas- and metalwork, ceramics, etc., but also on the broader “Islamic visual culture”, including the cinematic art, pop-culture (street art and graffiti) and the non-artistic visual representation of Islam and Islamism, e.g. from the field of politics (visual propaganda and mission) or every day visual culture (items and objects). The main goal is to offer a balanced and representative and a relatively comprehensive selection of secondary scientific texts (especially monographs, books, edited volumes, journal articles, bibliographies and academic theses) that were written about Islamic and Islamist visual culture, without including the primary sources.

Images of Thought: visuality in Islamic India, 1550-1750

'Images of Thought' provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world's major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. 'Images of Thought' is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.

THE ORIGINS OF PAİNTİNG IN THE MÜSLİM WORLD

F OR the reasons set forth in the preceding chapters, examples o f pictures from the earlier periods of the Muhammadan era are exceedingly rare, and there is no distinct evidence that any artist of native Arab birth made any contribution whatsoever to painting. The Arabs appear to have had very little feeling for either plastic or pictorial art. The wandering life of the desert was certainly uncongenial for the activities of either the sculptor or the painter, and the culture of the dwellers in such few towns as Arabia could boast of was largely influenced by the artistic and intellectual outlook of the Bedouins. The scanty remains of Sabaean and other pre-Islamic art in Arabia show how crude were the representations of their divinities, though in some of their bronze work lively representations of animal forms were achieved. The gods of the Arabs at the period of the birth of Muhammad received little in the way of artistic treatment, for the Arabs at this period seem to have been content with shapeless blocks of stone as symbols of the divinities they worshipped, and whenever they did spend any artistic effort upon them, it was of a meagre character. The image of Dhu 'l-Khalasa, which stood seven days' journey south of Mecca, was a white stone with a kind of crown worked upon it.1 Al-Fals, who was worshipped by the Banü Tayy, was a mere projection in the middle of a hill, bearing a rough resemblance to the figüre of a man.2 Al-Jalsad was a white stone like a human trunk with a kind ot head of black stone; if one looked closely at it, one could make out some slight resemblance to a human face.3 One of the idols in the Ka'bah at Mecca, named Hubal, was of red carnelian in the form of a man. This deity was an importation, and indeed two of the three4 Arabic words used in the Qur'ân for an idol—mathan and sananı—are foreign words, and it is probable that such artistic activity as was devoted to the plastic representations of them was likewise of foreign importation. But when in the seventh century the Arabs poured out of their deserts över the centres of a culture new to them, in the Roman and the Persian empires, they found gratification in painting as in other novel experiences which appealed to the frankly pagan spirit with which many of them were stili animated, in spite of their conversion to İslam. Their conquests oi

The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field

The Art Bulletin, 2003

When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago, there were no good introductory textbooks that undergraduates could read. When we started teaching the subject nearly a decade later, there were still none, and we had to make do with stacks of photocopied articles and chapters assigned from one book or another in an attempt to present students with a coherent narrative. So little survey material existed that even graduate students had difficulty getting a grasp on the whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publications. For example, K.A.C. Creswell's massive tomes implied that Islamic architecture ended in 900 C.E. except in Egypt, where it suddenly stopped four hundred years later in the middle of the Bahri Mamluk period, although the Mamluk sequence of sultans persisted until 1517 and there was ample evidence for a glorious tradition of Islamic architecture in many lands besides Egypt.' The venerable Survey of wieldy neologisms have not found widespread acceptance.7 Rather, most scholars tacitly accept that the convenient if incorrect term "Islamic" refers not just to the religion of Islam but to the larger culture in which Islam was the dominant-but not sole-religion practiced. Although it looks similar, "Islamic art" is therefore not comparable to such concepts as "Christian" or "Buddhist" art, which are normally understood to refer specifically to religious art. Christian art, for example, does not usually include all the art of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Reformation, nor does Buddhist art encompass all the arts of Asia produced between the Kushans and Kyoto. This important, if simple, distinction is often overlooked. And what about art? Islamic art is generally taken to encompass everything from the enormous congregational mosques and luxury manuscripts commissioned by powerful rulers from great architects and calligrapher-painters to the inlaid metalwares and intricate carpets produced by anonymous urban craftsmen and nomad women. However, much of what man)y historians of Islamic art normally study-inlaid metalwares, luster ceramics, enameled glass, brocaded textiles, and knotted carpets-is not the typical purview of the historian of Western art, who generally considers such handicrafts to be "minor" or "decorative" arts compared with the "nobler" arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. While architecture is as important in Islamic culture as it was in Western Europe or East Asia, visual representation, which plays such an enormous role in the artistic traditions of Europe and Asia, is a relatively minor and limited component of Islamic culture, and sculpture is virtually unknown. In sum, then, the term "Islamic art" seems to be a convenient misnomer for everything left over from everywhere else. It is most easily defined by what it is not: neither a region, nor a period, nor a school, nor a movement, nor a dynasty, but the visual culture of a place and time when the people (or at least their leaders) espoused a particular religion. Compared with other fields of art history, the study of Islamic art and architecture is relatively new. It was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and was of interest primarily to European and later American scholars." Unlike the study of Chinese art, which Chinese scholars have pursued for centuries, there is no indigenous tradition in any of the Islamic lands of studying Islamic art, with the possible exception of calligraphy, which has enjoyed a special status since the seventh century, and by extension book painting, which was collected since the sixteenth.9 There is no evidence that any artist or patron in the fourteen centuries since the revelation of Islam ever thought of his or her art as "Islamic," and the notion of a distinctly "Islamic" tradition of art and architecture, eventually encompassing the lands between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans, is a product of late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Western scholarship, as is the terminology used to identify it. Until that time, European scholars used such restrictive geographic or ethnic terms as "Indian" ("Hindu"), "Persian," "Turkish," "Arab," "Saracenic," and "Moorish" to describe distinct regional styles current in the Indian subcontinent, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, the Levant, and southern Spain. Such all-embracing terms as "Mahommedan" or "Mohammedan," "Moslem" or "Muslim," and "Islamic" came into favor only when twentieth-century scholars began to look back to a golden age of Islamic culture that they believe had flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries and project it simplistically onto the kaleidoscopic modern world. In short, Islamic art as it exists in the early twenty-first century is largely a creation of Western culture.10 This all-embracing view of Islam and Islamic art was a by-product of European interest in delineating the history of religions, in which the multifarious varieties of human spiritual expression were lumped together in a normative notion of a single "Islam," which could be effectively juxtaposed not only to heterodox "variants" such as "Shiism" and "Sufism" but also, and more importantly in the Western view, to equally normative notions of "Christianity" or "Judaism." This twentieth-century view, enshrined in countless books, is all the odder considering that there is no central authority that can speak for all Muslims, although many might claim to do so. No matter what newspapers-and many books-say, there never was, nor is, a single Islam, and so any attempt to define the essence of a single Islamic art is doomed to failure.1' To the 1970s Western views of Islam and its culture were formed in the crucible of colonialism, as foreign powers expanded economically and politically into the region during a period when traditional local powers-notably, the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mughals in northern India-were weakening. Colonialism was not limited to Western European imperialists. In the nineteenth century the Chinese and the Russians absorbed the Muslim khanates of Central Asia. The Chinese province of Xinjiang (literally, "New Territories") was carved out of Silk Road oases controlled for the last millennium by Muslims. The Russians, who sought warm-water ports, pushed south into Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Colonial expansion, which was initially motivated by a desire for raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, was enormously complicated in the twentieth century by the discovery of huge deposits of petroleum throughout the region, from the Algerian Sahara through Kurdistan and the Arabian Peninsula to Sumatra, and its consequent development as the world's major source of energy. These global events had several ramifications for the study of Islamic art. For at least a millennium, European travelers had brought back souvenirs of Islamic handicraft and given them new meanings. Itienne de Blois, commander of the First Crusade along with his brothers Godefroy de Bouillon and Baudoin, returned to France and became patron of the abbey of St-Josse near Caen. He apparently brought back with him the glorious samite saddlecloth made in northeastern Iran for the commander Abu Mansur Bakhtegin in the late tenth century (Fig. 1), for it was used to wrap the bones of the saint when he was reburied in 1134.12 The spectacular rockcrystal ewer made in Egypt for the Fatimid caliph al-Aziz (r. 975-96) must have had a similar history before it became a prized relic in the treasury of S. Marco.'3 During the sack of C6rdoba in 1010, Catalan mercenaries probably looted the